People say hearts get broken all the time. They say people die all the time. But what does that help? What does that even do, other than attempt to diminish the emotions at hand. I hope I haven’t done that to you, though I suspect in all these years that I have, that there have been times in my attempt to make you feel better you might have felt I was slighting your pain. Such a tricky balance. The key word is always balance. I cannot hear that word without picturing the little windup seal that was always in your toy box. Becca, you were barely the size of a grain of rice when your father bought it. I was vomiting several times a day, and whenever I came out of the bathroom of that old tiny apartment there in Cambridge, the tile of the bathroom so cold, your father would have the seal wound up so that the little red ball spun on the tip of its nose. We lost the seal somewhere along the way, but the ball is still there in the box.

My mother read “The Red Shoes” to me many times in childhood. That poor girl punished for wanting those shoes and wanting to dance. I remember sitting, the book on my lap, my mother beside me on the bed. I read “The Red Shoes” to you as well, and it always made you beg for “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” a much happier story for sure. A girl punished for her desires and sentenced to amputation or death, or a man rewarded for his acts of generous charity? My mother loved all the sad ones: “The Little Match Girl” and “The Little Mermaid” (the real version). She would have loved the movie “The Red Shoes,” which came out six years after she died. It was 1948, and I was 15 years old. Moira Shearer had to choose between her true love and being a famous dancer. I could imagine my mother in that high whine of hers: “Why did they make her choose?” And actually, I wondered the same thing. I didn’t sleep for weeks after, haunted by the harrowing final scene, where she goes after her true love only to go sailing out in front of a train.

In fact, I thought of that scene the first night I met your father and we stood there on the platform, and of course was so glad later that I had not mentioned it. I saw the movie a second time when I was in college, and it all held up for me; I was studying bookkeeping, which is what most girls did then. I loved psychology, and I loved literature, too.